We Can Get Productive, Efficient Government - What's The Delay?

December 6, 1991|By Myriam Marquez of The Sentinel Staff

Government jobs always seem so cushy. The public perception is that with a government job, you can coast until retirement.

That may not be entirely true, but it's hard to tell that to people whose jobs afford them no retirement plan, no medical insurance coverage and no cost-of-living raises. Those workers see their tax dollars going to huge bureaucracies protected by a career service system that offers government employees nifty retirement plans, excellent medical coverage and competitive wages.

They see government as the leech that sucks the blood out of working-class people who don't benefit from food stamps, Medicaid or subsidized housing programs open only to the very poor. And what they do see for their tax dollars makes them wince: overcrowded schools with high dropout rates, jammed roads, increasing pollution.

It's no wonder people feel cheated by government.

At least Gov. Lawton Chiles is trying to do something about the lack of public trust in government. He wants government to be more efficient so it can inspire taxpayer loyalty much as companies inspire consumer loyalty.

To have that happen, the Legislature needs to toss out that thick book on civil service, with its crazy maze of rules, and implement a career service system that values performance. Chiles' plan - while still protecting state workers from losing their jobs because they might disagree with the politics of a new governor - also insists on results to keep a job.

Under such a system, state workers would be given raises or bonuses based on their measured productivity - not on some automatic, across-the-board pay raise system that's micro-managed by the Legislature, as it is now. Under Chiles' plan, department managers - and not the Legislature - would have the power to reward workers for a job well done or show the door to those who don't do enough.

Right now, state workers have few incentives to do more with less. Across-the-board raises do little to inspire the good workers to do more when they see lazy workers making the same money they do. Chiles' plan couldn't be more sensible. Yet legislators are hemming and hawing that they don't have enough time to reform civil service in the upcoming one-week session. They want to study it some more.

What's there to study?

The Chiles administration already has shown results in productivity with its pilot project at the Workers' Compensation Division. In four months, the department's 400 workers have put out an incredible amount of work. In one month, for instance, workers cleared a backlog of cases that had existed for a decade.

''There's a striving ambition and attainment by employees now,'' said Secretary Frank Scruggs, who heads the state Department of Labor and Employment Security.

There's ambition because money is tied to job performance. Workers can earn up to $2,300 more a year, if they increase their workload and are quicker in delivering their services to the public. This not only gives workers an incentive to do more, it also gives the taxpayers more in the way of services.

Consider the issue of companies that were not paying into the state's pool for workers' compensation payments. In the past, the workers' comp division would have its investigators log a certain number of visits to companies each year, but there was no incentive for investigators to get companies to pay up.

Now, the division is paying bonuses to workers who catch companies that don't comply with the law and aren't paying into the insurance fund. With fewer workers, the division is actually nabbing more delinquent companies than ever before. That's the kind of productivity that people want to see out of their government. We don't need to have the Legislature study what's common sense to most people.